Wowd Blog

Trending topics in real-time

Do you like the way that Twitter offers a list of trending topics?

Would you like to be able to track the topics that are trending in real-time, against any search term that you care about?

Check out our recent column at Search Engine Watch to see how you can do this.  It's easy, valuable, and fun.

Wowd technology

Liz Gannes of GigaOm has written a great summary of Wowd's two new patents, and how the underlying technology is important in delivering high-quality, real-time discovery and search, and how this relates to social search (the social ranking of search results).

Full article here:

http://gigaom.com/2010/05/03/wowd-doubles-down-with-social-search-and-p2p-patents/

What's the job of a real-time search engine?

Is the job of a real-time search engine to deliver individual search results?  Or to provide an overview of what's happening around a specific topic, at a given moment in time?

Wowd offers discovery-powered search, which is a brand new way of exploring the real-time web.  Discovery-powered search delivers topic summaries for real-time topics, as you search.

Read more in our Search Engine Watch column: http://searchenginewatch.com/3640197

Forbes on Wowd

What a great title for an article: "Wowd: Searching The Darkness".  Taylor Buley and Quentin Hardy explore the origins and idea of Wowd in a Forbes article with that title, available today.

Only one comment... The article says that "... [people will] lend [Wowd] their computers and privacy for the purpose of searching the Web".  

In fact, I would argue that the approach that Wowd uses is much, much better for personal privacy than centralized approaches.

Let's say that you use a toolbar issued by a major search company.  Chances are, that toolbar is shipping back to some central location all the URLs that pass through your browser. 

After being captured in this manner, the centralized search provider has a decision to make for any given URL: should they have seen the URL, or should they not have seen it?  That is, your browser toolbar will be sending back URLs that are, in fact, quite private.  You're counting on the centralized authority to recognize its mistake, after the fact, and you're counting on them to keep the private URLs to themselves!  (Will the URLs be deleted?  Or just kept but not used, for ever?  If they're used, then how will they be used?  Who knows!)

With Wowd, a private URL is never, ever shared off your computer.  WIth Wowd, what happens is that when you visit a public web site, the URL for that site gets an anonymous vote, and then from some other point in the Wowd cloud of computers, the page pointed-to by that URL is retrieved and indexed.  The page is not retrieved from your computer.  There's no way to trace back from the retrieval of the page to the person who issued the nomination for the page.

No personal information is shared, no "fingerprints" are left in the system, and there's no way to trace back to any given user the pages that that user votes for in the system.  This is actually a much better approach than what most people put up with today.

So in no way can Wowd be considered "spyware".  Wowd protects individual identity much more effectively than centralized approaches ever could.  At Wowd, we take privacy seriously, and have designed our architecture from the ground up to put you in control of the information that describes what you do and where you go on the web.

Wowd: A great idea of 2009!

Wowd is mentioned in the NY Times Sunday Magazine today:

http://www.nytimes.com/projects/magazine/ideas/2009/#technology-17

One of the great ideas of 2009!

TechCrunch on Wowd

From TechCrunch, the folks who brought the world the first-ever Real-Time CrunchUp (which was an awesome event, by the way), we have an excellent analysis of Wowd's entry into the real-time search market.  See the TechCrunch article by Erick Schonfeld, here.

MIT Technology Review's Erica Naone on Wowd

Erica Naone of the MIT Technology Review has written about various forms of distributed computation in the recent past, and has done a great job in explaining what they do, and why it's valuable.

Today she's explaining the Wowd approach to distributed, user-powered page nomination, and real-time search.  Definitely worth a review!

MediaPost analyzes Wowd -- and gets Wowed

Rob Garner put together a very insightful analysis of Wowd, in his Search Insider column at MediaPost.  

He has some excellent observations about search and discovery in the real-time web.  A recommended read!

(And he provides an invitation token so that you can try Wowd for yourself, during our private beta phase.)

Wowd podcast interview leading up to the Web 2.0 Summit

Joshua-Michéle Ross of O'Reilly Radar conducted a podcast interview with Mark Drummond as a lead-up to the Web 2.0 Summit. 

Have a listen and hear about Wowd's unique approach to real-time discovery, search, and the real-time web.

Interesting discussion about Wowd -- on Flickr!

Steve Jurvetson (Wowd board member & investor) posted an access token for Wowd on his Flickr page.  He's got some very thoughtful and excellently analytical friends there, and managed to create a good discussion about the entire Wowd approach.  Recommended reading.